IP Bulletin (Summer 2012): Other Matters Of Interest - In Brief

Law Commission announces a review of UK legislative provisions relating to threats of proceedings for intellectual property infringement

Law Commission webpage on unjustified threats, 16 May 2012

The Law Commission considers that the current legal framework relating to threats of infringement of intellectual property rights is inconsistent and complex, and makes it difficult for the parties concerned to discuss reasonable settlement.

The Commission plans to launch a consultation on whether to repeal, reform or extend the existing UK legislative threats provisions concerning patents, trade marks and designs. The project will look specifically at section 70 of the Patents Act 1977; section 26 of the Registered Designs Act 1949; section 253 of the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988; section 21 of the Trade Marks Act 1994, paragraph 6 of the Community Trade Mark Regulations 2006 and regulation 2 of the Community Designs Regulation 2005 and will consider the balance between the rights of the proprietors of intellectual property interests and the rights of third parties so as to ensure that they are not subjected to an abuse of monopoly rights.

The consultation will be launched in February 2013 and a final report is intended to be published by March 2014.

Copyright Tribunal rules on reasonableness of fees payable by news monitoring Services

Following a protracted legal dispute between Meltwater and the Newspaper Licensing Agency ("NLA"), agreement has now been reached over the fees payable by news monitoring services to newspapers.

Meltwater provides a news clippings service to its clients, scanning news articles for certain words and providing news items concerning words to its clients. Meltwater bought a web database licence from the NLA to enable it to provide news aggregator services but challenged the fees NLA wished to charge.

In a legal dispute last year the Court of Appeal ruled that material on newspaper websites was protected by copyright. This meant that users of clipping services would require a licence from newspaper publishers to click on links to newspaper web pages in order to avoid copyright infringement.

The Copyright Tribunal was asked to determine the fees NLA could legitimately charge and ruled earlier this year that proposed fees were not reasonable in an interim decision.

NLA and Meltwater have now reached agreement on all outstanding matters and the Tribunal has accepted the licensing terms agreed. The terms include...